Portland, OR—January 18, 2013—Pacific Northwest College of Art (PNCA) brings provocative and pivotal thinkers, designers, and artists from all over the country to Portland for the Spring 2013 PNCA Graduate Visiting Artist Lecture Series. Each of the lectures is free and open to the public.

These lectures are the public-facing aspect of the Graduate Visiting Artist program, with its focus on experiential learning, knowledge sharing, and cross-disciplinary exchange. PNCA’s Graduate Visiting Artist program is a dynamic and essential part of each graduate program’s curriculum. Throughout the year, artists, scholars, designers, curators, and critics from around the globe are invited to engage with students and the community in a variety of formats, including lectures, conversations, panel discussions, group critiques, workshops, and studio visits. These visiting artists contribute to, challenge, and expand the academic and artistic discourse at PNCA, extending the possibilities for innovative instruction and learning. Details can be found on PNCA’s online calendar: cal.pnca.edu

Graham Harman
January 22, Swigert Commons
Graham Harman is the founder of Object-Oriented Ontology (OOO) and the author of numerous books, including Tool-Being: Heidegger and the Metaphysics of Objects, Guerrilla Metaphysics: Phenomenology and the Carpentry of Things, Circus Philosophicus, The Quadruple Object, and, most recently, Quentin Meillassoux: Philosophy in the Making and Weird Realism: Lovecraft and Philosophy. He lives in Cairo, Egypt, where he is Professor of Philosophy and Associate Provost for Research Administration at the American University.

Hazel Clark
January 23, Bison Buildingco-sponsored by OCAC’s Fibers Department
Hazel Clark is Research Chair of Fashion at the School of Art and Design History and Theory at Parsons and was formerly head of Swire School of Design at Hong Kong Polytechnic. She was one of the first graduates in Britain to be awarded a PhD in the history of design, and has since published and taught internationally, with particular interest in design and cultural identity and a focus on fashion and textiles.

Harold Nelson, PhD
January 30, Swigert Commons
Co-author of The Design Way: Intentional Change in an Unpredictable World, Harold Nelson is an architect, consultant, and systems scientist. Nelson is president of the Advanced Design Institute and is currently a visiting scholar in the School of Computer Science at the University of Montana. He has held faculty positions at Carnegie Mellon University and the University of Washington. Nelson’s research interests are in the fields of complex systems design, advanced design education, deep design/critique, and advanced design postulation and axiom development. Dr. Nelson received his Ph.D., graduating with distinction, from the University of California at Berkeley.

Simon Leung
January 31, Swigert Commons
Using video, performance, and other media, Simon Leung obliquely reinvents the war stories of our time. Pulling inspiration from objects, people, and writings that have been removed from their origins through the effects of time, circumstance, or historical violence, Leung recombines these parts to form new allegories that challenge the received meanings of his source material. A professor at University of California, Irvine, Leung has exhibited at the Guangzhou Triennial (2008), Lulea Biennial (2005), Venice Biennale (2003), Whitney Biennial (1993), Museum of Modern Art, Art Institute of Chicago, 1a Space (Hong Kong), and NGBK (Berlin).

David Aycan
February 5, Swigert Commons
David Aycan is a design director and business design discipline lead at IDEO. Aycan has experience integrating a strategic business perspective with a human-centered approach to design. During his seven years at IDEO, his experience has ranged across several industries, from commercial real estate to technology, food and beverage, and insurance. Prior to joining IDEO, Aycan co-founded and ran skateboard company Wongneto and clothing company Dull Clothes.

Geoffrey Mann
February 18, Swigert Commonsco-sponsored by Reed College’s Department of Art
Embedding time and motion into concrete objects, Scottish sculptor Geoffrey Mann creates work that blurs the lines between art and research, thinking and making, theory and practice. He has exhibited at MoMA, the Museum of Arts and Design, the Israel Museum, and the European Glass Context, and is the winner of the Bombay Sapphire Prize and the Jerwood Contemporary Makers Prize, among others. He is Programme Director of Glass at the Edinburgh College of Art, the University of Edinburgh.

Pearl Fryar
February 20, Bison Building
co-sponsored by PNCA’s General Fine Arts Department
Pearl Fryar is a sculptor who uses living plant material to create original, elegantly abstract forms of topiary. He is self-taught and as such has taken risks and developed techniques outside the normal bounds of horticulture. Fryar is not afraid to try new things and has been said to “tame trees” with his unique techniques. Born in rural North Carolina to a sharecropper, Fryar has overcome substantial obstacles through a position of selfless giving.

Doug Ischar
February 28, Swigert Commons
Since the early 1990s, Doug Ischar has worked in sound, video, and photography. Trained as a classical cellist, Ischar began studying art in his 30s, eventually earning an MFA degree from CalArts in 1987. Ischar’s early work, the documentary photographs collected in the series Marginal Waters (1985) and Honor Among (1987), participated in then-contemporary debates around gender and representation, with a particular emphasis on problems of masculinity in American gay male culture. Currently an associate professor of photography at the University of Illinois, Chicago, Ischar has exhibited at Museum of Contemporary Photography, Ottawa; Photographers Gallery, London; L.A.C.E., Los Angeles; and Museu de Arte Moderna, Sao Paulo.

Christopher Phillips
March 8, Swigert Commons
The United States needs constitutional change, but how to get it done? Christopher Phillips has an answer: get Americans talking to Americans about how we can improve our nation. Combining the approach of Socrates and the wisdom of Jefferson to show us the way, Phillips created the Constitution Café and Socrates Café dialogue groups.

Julie Patton
March 14, Swigert Commons
Poet and performance artist Julie Patton works with sound, spoken word, the visual arts, performance, dance, and poetry. She is the author of Using Blue To Get Black, Notes for Some (Nominally) Awake, and A Garden Per Verse (or What Else do You Expect from Dirt?). Patton’s site specific projects reflect her identity as a native plant and green space advocate, market gardener, and eco/arts educator, and emphasize improvisation and collaboration. She is a recipient of an Acadia Arts Foundation Grant and a New York Foundation for the Arts Poetry Fellowship, and has taught at The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science & Art, Naropa, Teachers & Writers Collaborative, and Schule fur Dichtung (Vienna, Austria).

Iris Eichenberg
March 20, Bison Buildingco-sponsored by OCAC’s Metals Department
Iris Eichenberg is artist-in-residence and head of metalsmithing at Cranbrook. She has worked as an independent artist and art educator, part-time curator, and co-organizer of art-related events. She has given numerous workshops in Europe, Asia, Africa, and North America, and has received numerous grants, awards, and residencies in Europe and North America. Eichenberg’s work can be found in museums in Europe and the U.S., including Stedelijk Museum and Fondation National d’Art Contemporain.

Pam Dixon
April 2, Swigert Commons
Pam Dixon founded the World Privacy Forum in November 2003. An author and a researcher, she has consistently broken critical new ground in her work. She has written highly respected and influential studies in the area of privacy, and she researched and wrote the first report to exist on medical identity theft (May 2006), identifying and bringing the topic to the public for the first time. Dixon was formerly a research fellow with the Privacy Foundation at Denver University’s Sturm School of Law. There, she researched and wrote about technology-related privacy issues.

Allyson Mitchell
April 10, Bison Buildingco-sponsored by PNCA’s Sculpture Department
Allyson Mitchell is a maximalist artist working predominantly in sculpture, installation, and film. Since 1997, Mitchell has been melding feminism and pop culture to play with contemporary ideas about sexuality, autobiography, and the body, largely through the use of reclaimed textiles and abandoned craft. She has exhibited in galleries and festivals across Canada, the U.S., Europe, and East Asia, and is an assistant professor in the School of Women’s Studies at York University.

The Bison Building is located at 421 NE 10th Avenue, Portland, OR.
Swigert Commons is in the Main Campus Building at Pacific Northwest College of Art, 1241 NW Johnson St, Portland, OR.

ABOUTGRADUATESTUDIES AT PACIFICNORTHWESTCOLLEGE OF ARTPNCA prepares students for a life of creative practice with five graduate degrees under the auspices of its Ford Institute for Visual Education (FIVE): an MFA in Visual Studies, a Low-Residency MFA in Visual Studies, an MA in Critical Theory and Creative Research, an MFA in Collaborative Design, and an MFA in Applied Craft and Design developed with the Oregon College of Art and Craft, the first inter-institutional degree of its kind in the US.

ABOUTPACIFICNORTHWESTCOLLEGE OF ART
As Oregon’s flagship college of art and design since 1909, Pacific Northwest College of Art has helped shape Oregon’s visual arts landscape for more than a century. PNCA students study with award-winning faculty in small classes. In the last seven years, PNCA has doubled both the student body and full-time faculty, quadrupled its endowment, and added innovative undergraduate and graduate programs. PNCA is now embarking on its boldest venture yet by establishing the Arlene and Harold Schnitzer Center for Art and Design as an anchor for the College’s vision of a new campus home on Portland’s North Park Blocks. Focusing on the transformative power of creativity, the capital campaign, Creativity Works Here, was launched in June 2012 with a lead gift from The Harold & Arlene Schnitzer CARE Foundation of $5 million. PNCA’s new home will be a bustling hub for creativity and entrepreneurship, reflecting the influential role of art and design in our 21st century economy – both in Portland and beyond. For more information, visit pnca.edu.